Pretty good gig if you can get it.
Unfortunately for Stiviano, Donald Sterling’s wife Shelly wants it all back. She is claiming in a lawsuit that Stiviano took advantage of the fact her husband is suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer disease.
Before V. Stiviano’s recordings toppled Donald Sterling from ownership of the Los Angeles Clippers, she boasted she would be the next Mrs. Sterling.
She would pick up envelopes of cash in an alley behind the family’s real estate company and told employees at the firm she would one day be their boss.
Those predictions seemed like a fantasy on Wednesday as Sterling’s wife went after the $3.6 million that she said the younger woman swindled from community property the couple amassed over 60 years of marriage.
Donald Sterling, 80, who has been diagnosed with symptoms of Alzheimer’s, was at times forgetful and testy. He said Stiviano hadn’t contributed ’50 cents’ to the $1.8 million duplex now in her name.
Sterling, a lawyer and shrewd businessman who made a fortune buying apartment buildings across Los Angeles, never explained why he purchased the house, though he made it clear he paid every penny because he said Stiviano was poor and her family was on welfare.
He said the house was supposed to be in the name of his family trust. Noting that Stiviano is part black and Hispanic, he said she illegally got her name inserted into escrow documents by befriending a Hispanic bank employee who added her name to a $1 million check.
Sterling said he only intended to loan a Ferrari and a Bentley to Stiviano, but he put them under her name so he wouldn’t be liable if she killed somebody, adding that she was once charged with drunken driving.
This appears to me to be part fraud, part rich man being enamoured with his young mistress. We will have to see how the courts rule.
